twister - a P2P microblogging platform
This addresses privacy and censorship concerns for users of social media platforms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of centralized control in microblogging by proposing a peer-to-peer architecture called twister, which leverages Bitcoin, DHT, and Bittorrent protocols to achieve security, scalability, and privacy, with a mechanism that incentivizes contributions by allowing limited unsolicited messages.
This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint "swarms" of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users. By leveraging from existing and proven technologies, twister provides a new microblogging platform offering security, scalability and privacy features. A mechanism provides incentive for entities that contribute processing time to run the user registration network, rewarding such entities with the privilege of sending a single unsolicited ("promoted") message to the entire network. The number of unsolicited messages per day is defined in order to not upset users.